Unexpected Stage Company Presents '8 STOPS' Theater Production

From Unexpected Stage Company:

As part of its seventh season, Unexpected Stage Company will present OBIE Award-winning artist Deb Margolin in the Washington area premiere of 8 STOPS. The production will run from July 14 through July 31, 2016, at Randolph Road Theater, 4010 Randolph Road, Wheaton, MD (the former Round House space).

General admission tickets are priced $10 to $27.50, and are on sale via phone at 800-838-3006, online here, and at the door subject to availability. A special Pay-What-You-Can preview performance is scheduled for Thursday, July 14 at 7:30 p.m. Discounts available for Wheaton residents, students, seniors, military, and groups. For information, please call 301-337-8290 or visit here.

Playwright, actor, and Yale University associate professor Margolin will perform 8 STOPS, a comedy she wrote concerning the grief of endless compassion. She reunites with director Jay Wahl, artistic director of programming and presentations of Philadelphia’s Kimmel Center, where he directed the play’s world premiere.

Known to D.C. audiences for the provocative play Imagining Madoff, Margolin’s thought-provoking new solo work 8 STOPS is about the inheritability of a kind of compassion that makes the loveliest fools of all it touches, and extends itself to animals, objects, those both animate and inanimate, that cannot speak from themselves. Looking at life and death through the eyes of her son, Margolin's comic investigation reaches many of the saddest registers as she contemplates the suburbs, the spiritual exurbs, illness, desire, and a subway ride with a motherless child who Margolin realizes she has to raise in the time it takes to travel eight stops. This rousing work will leave theater-goers with questions about the nature of compassion and the limits, and the limitlessness, of human endurance.

“Solo performance is to the stage what the close up is to the film; you just go very deep,” explains Margolin. “Writing a solo show enables me to speak about things that are very particular to my experiences and the very things in which I am passionate.”

8 STOPS was developed in part during the Dael Orlandersmith Writing Residency in the SEI Innovation Studio at the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts. Merri Milwe and Jay Wahl served as dramaturgs.

Season subscriptions are now available. To purchase, please call 800-838-3006 or visit here.

8 STOPS: Written and Performed by Deb Margolin

July 14 – July 31, 2016

Show Schedule:

• Thursdays and Fridays at 7:30 p.m.
• Saturdays at 7:30 p.m.
• Sundays at 2 p.m.

Special Opportunities

Thanks to funding from the Montgomery County Executive’s Ball, Unexpected Stage will be able to provide 75 free student/teacher tickets for 8 STOPS. Tickets are available on a first-come, first-served basis. Tickets may be reserved here.

Thanks to a grant from the Arts and Humanities Council of Montgomery County, Wheaton residents may purchase tickets for $5 (plus service charge) with proof of residency.

About Unexpected Stage Company

Celebrating its seventh season in 2016, Unexpected Stage Company is a professional regional theater company founded by the husband-and-wife team of Christopher Goodrich and Rachel Stroud-Goodrich. The company dedicates itself to honoring the intricacies and intimacies of the complete human experience and, to that end, seeks to unite people, place and storytelling in order to explore interconnection. Visit here and or Facebook.

This project is supported in part by funding from the Montgomery County government and the Arts and Humanities Council of Montgomery County.

Unexpected Stage Company is funded by an operating grant from the Maryland State Arts Council, an agency dedicated to cultivating a vibrant cultural community where the arts thrive. Funding for the Maryland State Arts Council is also provided by the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency.

Unexpected Stage gratefully acknowledges The Center for Organizational Excellence for its generous support.

Image of practice scenes via Unexpected Stage Company